Denninger Sounds Alarm on Trump Healthcare Reorg

Karl Denninger has just sounded the alarm in his Market-Ticker.org site that perhaps the formative Trump organization may be softening the one critical reform necessary to actually fix healthcare – increase competition which automatically breaks up medical monopolies.

Denninger says that government spending on Medicare and Medicaid is about to break our economy. It’s increasing at roughly 9% per year. By the end of Prez Trump’s 1st term, these two programs alone will have increased $600 billion per year. This is the fastest-rising cost to the U.S. government.

“For scale, $600 billion is roughly the size of all defense spending – and that’s the additional amount we will … tack onto to what is already being spent today.”

“This is not due to people getting older, it is due to medical monopolies that in any other line of work would land everyone involved in federal prison.”

What concerns Denninger is Trump’s website had a very specific plan laid out before the election. Suddenly in the last week that has changed – dropping off the following two critical provisions – items #5 and #7.

“#5. Require price transparency from all healthcare providers, especially doctors and healthcare organizations like clinics and hospitals. Individuals should be able to shop to find the best prices for procedures, [or] exams….”

… and
“#7. Remove barriers … for drug providers that offer safe, reliable and cheaper products … from overseas [that] will bring more options to consumers.”

According to Denninger, maintaining the protective legislation that allows these medical monopolies to flourish is why health care costs in the U.S. are so high.

“Capitalism always outperforms socialism for the simple reason that a capitalist system adds an incentive to undercut [costs].”
says that killing off the monopolistic laws that protect the high prices of both drugs and medical procedures is easy for Congress to fix and: